Harvest
Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, CoHo, Collaboration, Emergence
This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond the forms of minutes, notes or summaries. In the Art of Hosting community we are currently looking at how to broaden this activity.
George and Peggy and I looked at what this starting pattern said about the processes of harvesting, including teasing apart the word itself. We started by teasing apart the basic pattern of harvest and noticed that it lives in three modes: time, media and speech acts. We immediately asked the question what would harvesting looked like if we fully harvested from these modes, to wit:
- Time modes of the past present and future. We are practiced at harvesting from what has happened, but what does it mean to harvest in the moment, and to harvest from the future? The World Cafe process lights up the practice of harvesting in the present, as we capture and map nuggets of insight. The work of the Presencing community might have some insight into how we might harvest from the future, through a process of sensing and presencing.
- Media modes include the typical text modes that we use to harvest (reports and web sites, for example) but increasingly I am personally using audio and visual representations in my own harvesting work and this week I worked with Thomas Arthur who, as a performing artist and in relationship with Ashley Cooper, is harvesting from our gathering using video to capture the patterns of how we were together. Graphic facilitation is a method that combines hosting and harvest in the present, and the commission of music, dance and other movement is a mode of harvest that, although it is strange to Western cultures, is very alive in traditional cultures. Here on the west coast of North America events are harvested through song and dance and the song and dance live to “tell the story” of an event. In the Ojibway territories of Canada, they used birch bark scrolls and petroglyphs, “abstract” wampum belts and rock paintings of images and shapes to harvest. Traditional cultures know that the full story of something cannot be told simply with language and so the harvest often lives in what western cultures might call abstract art. It is precisely this abstraction that allows for the richness of the harvest to live.
- Speech act modes are all about the way the harvest is communicated. Typically harvest takes the shape of “telling the story” and so remains in the monological mode. Harvesting can also take the form of inquiry where the harvest is a question and invitation to engage. In both modes support is needed for understanding to arise, so in a telling mode, one must have a good communications infrastructure to get the story out and understood, In an inquiry mode, one also needs a way to support the harvest of an event. Harvesting through inquiry sets up a reflective learning process with the world at large and so it demands an open, inviting and deep listening infrastructure to further the work of the gathering that produced the harvest.
- Levels of what is happening which implies that there is more going on in any given gathering than simply what can be captured in a set of notes. Levels might include, the level of work, the level of process, the level of underlying patterns.
I got really excited about these, for when you combine these modes together (in the moment video making, having children in a gathering tell the story of the future, producing a series of audio recordings that ask questions) the art of harvesting becomes liberating and alive. A menu pattern emerges in which you might select harvesting strategies to both serve the purpose of the gathering and stretch it to harvest the underlying patterns of the gathering which make for learning conversations about HOW we meet as well as what is done in any given meeting.
There are many other dynamics that might emerge from this thinking on harvesting, including how we might harvest both individually and collectively or in combination, and harvesting from an inner perspective along with an objective perspective, which leads us to an integral model of harvest.
We also spoke of how technology, taxonomy and folksonomy might conspire to extract patterns of meaning from our artifacts of conversation through “knowledge gardening“, which is work that has been alive in George’s life for many decades.
As we spoke I found that our conversation became inspiring and emergent. We initially began informally in three chairs at the end of a long day of meeting, and we moved to have dinner together in the room in which we had held a World Cafe earlier in the day. The markers and paper were still on this table, like a huge “back of a napkin” which just begged scrawl. I started mind mapping our conversation which led us to explore many branches of what was possible and still keep the emerging whole in front of us. I was so excited by what we were learning together that I found myself “sparking” for many hours afterwards. There was a breathless feeling to our talk which became so strong that we actually felt it must be in the field of the after dinner conversation among others too. We called for a late night circle with others to harvest from the conversations that happened at the end of the day. What we discovered was that the pattern of inspiration was alive in the natural cafe of dinnertime and much of what was harvested by all and then understood collectively provided the fodder we needed to integrate our experiences of two days and lead us towards a place where day three could be convergent and about the implications of our work in the world together.
And so in the spirit of inquiry about harvesting, what do you think? What is alive in you about this story? Where does it lead you?
[tags]George Por, Peggy Holman[/tags]
Thanks Chris for this harvest on harvesting! I wish I was there to be part of this inspiring field… My question on harvest is also: what is the meaning of this gathering in the overall field that is emerging through it? So: another ‘level of what is happening’. I see a collective capacity that is growing through a lot of this gatherings; and it is growing into more and more collective leadership. Taking up leadership as a collective, but also leadership for the collective. Harvesting from gatherings is essentially that I guess: in support of the collective.
What can collective leadership be if it is about supporting the ‘harvesting of the future’ in the gatherings to come?
I don’t have a clue, but that is the inquiry…
With love, from Belgium,
Ria
What a great harvest of our conversation! Thanks for capturing it so eloquently.
A couple thoughts to weave into the mix.
IMAGINING THE FUTURE INTO BEING
On Time Modes, the idea of harvesting from the future for me has roots in what I have learned through working with Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The essential core of AI is that positive image leads to positive action. Said another way, we can create what we can imagine. That’s the point of an appreciative inquiry – through understanding the best of “what is” and “what is possible”, by following the life-energy of our individual and collective imagination, we internalize and integrate powerful images of the future we want. I actually find the metaphor of harvest a misnomer for this. For me, this is more of a calling into being through naming something; we imagine the future into existence.
—
THE GIFT OF THE ARTIST
A major insight for me of our gathering is the role of the artist in carrying the meaning of a meeting beyond the event. The video Thomas Arthur made of our session was strikingly beautiful. Even without much content incorporated as yet, he captured the energy and spirit of our time together. I could see in a way I have never appreciated before how art carries meaning with great depth and power.
—
RIPPLES
One thread that most excited me in our conversation was the idea of ripples…what enables a gathering to have life and influence beyond the people in the room? You told a story of this Chris, in which grant recipients, rather than reporting back to a foundation, were required to share what they learned in a gathering of peers. Their documents were made available in an archives. The combination created a feedback loop, in which others had a chance to interact and learn from their peers. For me, that took the art of harvesting from a static process into a living, ongoing practice.
So the learning continues….
Chris and Peggy and Ria–
Two things have me going from what you have said here: the abstract art not capturing but freeing what cannot be well held in words. There is something emergent here….
Second, Peggy’s post reminds me of the oft-heard phrase, “It is what it is.” So the second ripple for me from this conversation is What if it isn’t what it is?
It is something to rest on, like the pieces of The Tao of Holding Space….
:- Doug.
Chris, I can see how these conversations sparked you–those sparks are still sizzling through your words!
I’ve been simmering your post and the rich response in the back of mind for the past few days, and now feeling like I’d like to pour a little something in the pot too before too long (because although old blog posts don’t get stale, they do disappear from the screen after a while!) …even though these ingredients are still pretty raw…
I am thinking about the act and metaphor of harvesting, and how we use that metaphor in Chinese medicine, how it describes one of the cycling seasons of human life…we think of the act of harvesting as gathering up the fruits (grains, seeds, etc) of the season before–the fruits being the nourishing, assimilable parts produced by everything we’ve been exposed to and learned and lived through–leaving behind any rotten and maybe the unripe specimens, the stems and the chaff and the stuff that’s not edible (but will often become compost or somehow nourishing for the ground that produced the fruit). So there is discernment involved regarding what’s going to be picked, gathered, stored, eaten, and you don’t usually pick it all (I don’t know how this can apply to the kind of harvesting you are writing about but will toss it out there anyway)
We connect harvesting with the function of digestion, too, with absorption, assimilation, transformation and transportation (throughout the body). Which might be part of the next steps that follow the story harvest that you describe. How will what’s harvested be prepared in order to become nourishment? Is it already delicious and ready to eat? Or does it need to be shelled and fermented and dried and roasted and crushed and melted (I’m thinking of the sacred cacao bean on its way to chocolate!). This seems like item #4 on the AoH page you link to–taking the fruits you’ve collected and in various ways deriving the nourishment/meaning/patterns that will be useful.
Then the next season after the harvest is as essential as every other–having the quiet, slow, fallow time after the harvest is gathered in, having time to draw on what’s been stored up, to allow the life which produced the harvest to hunker down and gestate the seeds from the fruits, underground and in the dark.
thanks for the sparks!
Peggy mentions the grant making model I talked about.
You can read that here:
http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=860
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God dag! Kan jag ladda ner en bild fran din blogg. Av sak med hanvisning till din webbplats!